Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  How would you describe the place of the writer and artist in American life?

  Strange.

  How do you perceive your place in society?

  I’m not sure what that means.

  Well, in this small Louisiana town, for example.

  I’m still not sure what you mean. I go to the barbershop to get a haircut and the barber says: “How you doing, Doc?” I say: “Okay.” I go to the post office to get the mail and the clerk says: “What’s up, Doc?” Or I go to a restaurant on Lake Pontchartrain and the waitress says: “What you want, honey?” I say: “Some cold beer and crawfish.” She brings me an ice-cold beer and a platter of boiled crawfish that are very good, especially if you suck the heads. Is that what you mean?

  What about living in the South, with its strong sense of place, of tradition, of rootedness, of tragedy—the only part of America that has ever tasted defeat?

  I’ve read about that. Actually, I like to stay in motels in places like Lincoln, Nebraska, or San Luis Obispo.

  But what about these unique characteristics of the South? Don’t they tend to make the South a more hospitable place for writers?

  Well, I’ve heard about that, the storytelling tradition, sense of identity, tragic dimension, community, history, and so forth. But I was never quite sure what it meant. In fact, I’m not sure that the opposite is not the case. People don’t read much in the South and don’t take writers very seriously, which is probably as it should be. I’ve managed to live here for thirty years and am less well-known than the Budweiser distributor. The only famous person in this town is Isiah Robertson, linebacker for the Rams, and that is probably as it should be, too. There are advantages to living an obscure life and being thought an idler. If one lived in a place like France where writers are honored, one might well end up like Sartre, a kind of literary-political pope, a savant, an academician, the very sort of person Sartre made fun of in Nausea. On the other hand, if one is thought an idler and a bum, one is free to do what one pleases. One day a fellow townsman asked me: “What do you do, Doc?” “Well, I write books.” “I know that, Doc, but what do you really do?” “Nothing.” He nodded. He was pleased and I was pleased.

  I have a theory of why Faulkner became a great writer. It was not the presence of a tradition and all that, as one generally hears, but the absence. Everybody in Oxford, Mississippi, knew who Faulkner was, not because he was a great writer, but because he was a local character, a little-bitty fellow who put on airs, wore a handkerchief up his sleeve, a ne’er-do-well, Count No-Count they called him. He was tagged like a specimen under a bell jar; no matter what he wrote thereafter, however great or wild or strange it was, it was all taken as part of the act. It was part of “what Bill Faulkner did.” So I can imagine it became a kind of game with him, with him going to extraordinary lengths in his writing to see if he could shake them out of their mild, pleasant inattention. I don’t mean he wanted his fellow Southerners to pay him homage, that his life and happiness depended on what they thought of him. No, it was a kind of game. One can imagine Robinson Crusoe on his island doing amazing acrobatics for his herd of goats, who might look up, dreamily cud chewing for a moment, then go on with their grazing. “That one didn’t grab you?” Crusoe might say, then come out with something even more stupendous. But even if he performed the ultimate stunt, the Indian rope trick, where he climbs up a stiff rope and disappears, the goats would see it as no more or less than what this character does under the circumstances. Come to think of it, who would want it otherwise? There is a good deal of talk about community and the lack of it, but one of the nice things about living an obscure life in the South is that people don’t come up to you, press your hand, and give you soulful looks. I would have hated to belong to the Algonquin Round Table, where people made witty remarks and discussed Ezra Pound. Most men in the South don’t read and the women who do usually prefer Taylor Caldwell and Phyllis Whitney to Faulkner and O’Connor.

  No, it is the very absence of a tradition that makes for great originals like Faulkner and O’Connor and Poe. The South is Crusoe’s island for a writer and there’s the good and bad of it. There is a literary community of sorts in the North. The best Northern writers are, accordingly, the best of a kind. As different as Bellow, Cheever, Updike, and Pynchon are, their differences are within a genus, like different kinds of fruit: apples, oranges, plums, pears. A critic or reviewer can compare and contrast them with one another. But Faulkner, O’Connor, Barthelme? They’re moon berries, kiwi fruit, niggertoes.

  Niggertoes?

  That’s what we used to call Brazil nuts.

  How did you happen to become a writer? Didn’t you start out as a doctor?

  Yes, but I had no special talent for it. Others in my class were smarter. Two women, three Irish Catholics, four Jews, and ten WASPs were better at it than I. What happened was that I discovered I had a little knack for writing. Or perhaps it is desire, a kind of underhanded desire.

  What do you mean by knack?

  It is hard to say.

  Try.

  I suspect it is something all writers have in greater or lesser degree. Maybe it’s inherited, maybe it’s the result of a rotten childhood—I don’t know. But unless you have it, you’ll never be a writer.

  Can you describe the knack?

  No, except in negative terms. It is not what people think it is. Most people think it is the perfecting of the ordinary human skills of writing down words and sentences. Everybody writes words and sentences—for example, in a letter. A book is thought to be an expanded and improved letter, the way a pro ballplayer is thought to do things with a ball most men can do, only better. Not so. Or if you have an unusual experience, all you have to do is “write it up,” the more unusual and extraordinary the experience the better, like My Most Extraordinary Experience in Reader’s Digest. Not so. Psychologists know even less about writing than do laymen. Show me a psychologist with a theory of creativity and I’ll show you a bad writer.

  Can’t you say what the knack is?

  No, except to say that it is a peculiar activity, as little understood as chicken fighting or entrail reading, and that the use of words, sentences, paragraphs, plots, characters, and so forth, is the accident, not the substance, of it.

  What is it if not the putting together of words and sentences?

  I can’t answer that except to say two things. One is that it is a little trick one gets onto, a very minor trick. One does it and discovers to one’s surprise that most people can’t do it. I used to know a fellow in high school who, due to an anomaly of his eustachian tubes, could blow smoke out of both ears. He enjoyed doing it and it was diverting to watch. Writing is something like that. Another fellow I knew in college, a fraternity brother and a trumpet player, could swell out his neck like a puff adder—the way the old horn player Clyde McCoy used to do when he played “Sugar Blues.”

  The other thing about the knack is that it has theological, demonic, and sexual components. One is aware, on the one hand, of a heightened capacity for both malice and joy and, occasionally and with luck, for being able to see things afresh and even to make things the way the Old Testament said that God made things and took a look at them and saw that they were good.

  The best novel, and the best part of a novel, is a creatio ex nihilo. Unlike God, the novelist does not start with nothing and make something of it. He starts with himself as nothing and makes something of the nothing with things at hand. If the novelist has a secret, it is not that he has a special something but that he has a special nothing. Camus said that all philosophy comes from the possibility of suicide. This is probably not true, one of those intellectual oversimplifications to which the French regularly fall prey. Suicide, the real possibility of self-nihilation, has more to do with writing poems and novels. A novelist these days has to be an ex-suicide. A good novel—and, I imagine, a good poem—is possible only after one has given up and let go. Then, once one realizes that all is lost, the jig is up, that, after all, nothing
is dumber than a grown man sitting down and making up a story to entertain somebody or working in a “tradition” or “school” to maintain his reputation as a practitioner of the nouveau roman or whatever—once one sees that this is a dumb way to live, that all is vanity sure enough, there are two possibilities: either commit suicide or not commit suicide. If one opts for the former, that is that; it is a letzte Lösung and there is nothing more to write or say about it. But if one opts for the latter, one is in a sense dispensed and living on borrowed time. One is not dead! One is alive! One is free! I won’t say that one is like God on the first day, with the chaos before him and a free hand. Rather, one feels, What the hell, here I am, washed up, it is true, but also cast up, cast up on the beach, alive and in one piece. I can move my toe up and then down and do anything else I choose. The possibilities open to one are infinite. So why not do something Shakespeare and Dostoevsky and Faulkner didn’t do, for, after all, they are nothing more than dead writers, members of this and that tradition, much-admired busts on a shelf. A dead writer may be famous but he is also dead as a duck, finished. And I, cast up here on this beach? I am a survivor! Alive! A free man! They’re finished. Possibilities are closed. As for God? That’s His affair. True, He made the beach, which, now that I look at it, is not all that great. As for me, I might try a little something here in the wet sand, a word, a form …

  What’s this about a sexual component?

  I’d rather not say.

  Why not?

  Because no end of dreary bullshit has been written on the subject, so much as to befoul the waters for good. Starting with Freud’s rather stupid hydraulic model of art as the sublimation of libidinal energies: libido suppressed in the boiler room squirts up in the attic. There followed half a century of dull jokes about x orgasms equals y novels down the drain, and so forth and so forth. Freud’s disciples have been even more stupid about “creative writing.” At least Freud had the good sense to know when to shut up, as he did in Dostoevsky’s case. But stupider still is the more recent Hemingway machismo number. The formula is: Big pencil equals big penis. My own hunch is that those fellows have their troubles, otherwise why make love with a pencil? Renoir may have started it with a smart-ass statement: “I paint with my penis.” If I were a woman, I wouldn’t stand for such crap. No wonder women get enraged these days. Some of the most feminine women writers have this same knack, or better, and can use it to a fare-thee-well—Southern women like K. A. Porter, Welty, O’Connor—look out for them!

  The twentieth century, noted for its stupidity in human matters, is even stupider than usual in this case. And in this case Muhammad Ali is smarter than either Freud or Hemingway. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Ali’s exaltation and cunning and beauty and malice apply even more to writing than to fighting. Freud made a mistake only a twentieth-century professor would have been capable of: trying to explain the human psyche by a mechanical-energy model. Take away 450 psychic calories for love and that leaves you 450 short for art. Actually, it’s the other way around. The truth is paradoxical and can’t be understood in terms of biological systems. Psychic energy is involved here, but it follows a different set of laws. Like Einstein’s theory, it at times defies Newton’s law of gravitation. Thus, it is not the case that E minus one half E equals one half E (Newton, Freud), but rather E minus one half E equals six E. Or simply, zero minus E equals E—which is more astounding than Einstein’s E equals MC squared.

  I will give you a simple example. Let us say a writer finds himself at 0, naught, zero, at 4 p.m. of a Thursday afternoon. No energy, depressed, strung out, impotent, constipated, a poet sitting on the kitchen floor with the oven door open and the gas on, an incarnated nothingness, an outer human husk encasing an inner cipher. The jig is up. The poem or novel is no good. But since the jig is up, why not have another look, or tear it up and start over? Then, if he is lucky—or is it grace, God having mercy on the poor bastard?—something opens. A miracle occurs. Somebody must have found the Grail. The fisher king is healed, the desert turns green—or better still: the old desert is still the old desert, but the poet names it and makes it a new desert. As for the poet himself: in a strange union of polarities—wickedness/good, malice/benevolence, hatred/love, butterfly/bee—he, too, comes together, sticks his tongue in his cheek, sets pencil to paper: What if I should try this? Uh-huh, maybe … He works. He sweats. He stinks. He creates. He sweats and stinks and creates like a woman conceiving. Then what? It varies. Perhaps he takes a shower, changes clothes. Perhaps he takes a swim in the ocean. Perhaps he takes a nap. Perhaps he takes a drink, flatfoots half a glass of Bourbon. Then, if he is near someone he loves or wants to love or should love or perhaps has loved all along but has not until this moment known it, he looks at her. And by exactly the same measure by which the novel has opened to him and he to it, he opens to her and she to him. Well, now, why don’t you come here a minute? That’s it. Give me your hand. He looks at her hand. He is like the castaway on the beach who opens his eyes and sees a sunrise coquina three inches from his nose. Her hand is like the coquina. What an amazing sight! Well, now, why don’t we just sit down here on this cypress log? Imagine your being here at four-thirty in the afternoon. All this time I thought I was alone on this island and here you are. A miracle! Imagine Crusoe on his island performing the ultimate stunt for his goats, when he turns around and there she is. Who needs Friday? What he needs now is her, or she him, as the case may be.

  Such is the law of conservation of energy through its expenditure: zero minus E equals E.

  If writing is a knack, does the knack have anything to do with being Southern?

  Sure. The knack has certain magic components that once came in handy for Southern writers. This is probably no longer the case.

  Why is that?

  Well, as Einstein once said, ordinary life in an ordinary place on an ordinary day in the modern world is a dreary business. I mean dreary. People will do anything to escape this dreariness: booze up, hit the road, gaze at fatal car wrecks, shoot up heroin, spend money on gurus, watch pornographic movies, kill themselves, even watch TV. Einstein said that was the reason he went into mathematical physics. One of the few things that diverted me from the dreariness of growing up in a country-club subdivision in Birmingham was sending off for things. For example, sending off for free samples, such as Instant Postum. You’d fill in a coupon clipped from a magazine and send it off to a magic faraway place (Battle Creek?), and sure enough, one morning the mailman would hand you a box. Inside would be a small jar. You’d make a cup and in the peculiar fragrance of Postum you could imagine an equally fragrant and magical place where clever Yankee experts ground up stuff in great brass mortars.

  That was called “sending off for something.”

  It was even better with Sears, Roebuck: looking at the picture in the catalogue, savoring it, fondling it, sailing to Byzantium with it, then—even better than poetry—actually getting it, sending off to Chicago for it, saving up your allowance and mailing a postal money order for $23.47 and getting back a gold-filled Elgin railroader’s pocket watch with an elk engraved on the back. With a strap and a fob.

  Writing is also going into the magic business. It is a double transaction in magic. You have this little workaday thing you do that most people can’t do. But in the South there were also certain magic and exotic ingredients, that is, magic and exotic to Northerners and Europeans, which made the knack even more mysterious. As exotic to a New Yorker as an Elgin pocket watch to an Alabama boy. I’ve often suspected that Faulkner was very much on to this trick and overdid it a bit.

  You write something, send it off to a publisher in New York, and back it comes as a—book! Print! Pages! Cover! Binding! Scribble-scratch is turned into measured paragraphs, squared-off blocks of pretty print. And even more astounding: in the same mail that brought the Elgin pocket watch come reviews, the printed thoughts of people who have read the book!

  The less the two parties know about each other, the further ap
art they are, the stronger the magic. It must be very enervating to be a writer in New York, where you know all about editing and publishing and reviewing, to discover that editors and publishers and reviewers are as bad off as anyone else, maybe worse. Being a writer in the South has its special miseries, which include isolation, madness, tics, amnesia, alcoholism, lust, and loss of ordinary powers of speech. One may go for days without saying a word. Then, faced with an interviewer, one may find oneself talking the way one fancies the interviewer expects one to talk, talking Southern—for example, using such words as “Amon”: “Amon git up and git myself a drink.” Yet there are certain advantages to the isolation. At best, one is encouraged to be original;at worst, bizarre; sometimes both, like Poe.

  It was this distance and magic that once made for the peculiarities of Southern writing. Now the distance and magic are gone, or going, and Southern writers are no better off than anyone else, perhaps worse, because now that the tricks don’t work and you can’t write strange like Faulkner, what do you do? Write like Bellow? But before—and even now, to a degree—the magic worked. You were on your own and making up little packages to send to faraway folk. As marooned as Crusoe, one was apt to be eccentric. That’s why Poe, Faulkner, O’Connor, and Barthelme are more different from one another than Bellow, Updike, and Cheever are.

  The Southern writer at his best was a value because he was somewhat extraterrestrial. (At his worst, he was overwhelmed by Faulkner: there is nothing more feckless than imitating an eccentric.) He was different enough from the main body of writers to give the reader a triangulation point for getting a fix on things. There are degrees of difference. If the writer is altogether different from the genus Writer, which is the only genus the reviewer knows, the reviewer is baffled—as New York reviewers like Clifton Fadiman were baffled by Faulkner; they were trying to compare him with such standard writers as Thornton Wilder, and it can’t be done. But if the critic recognizes the value of difference, the possibility of an extraterrestrial point of view, he will be excited. That’s why the French went nuts over Poe and Faulkner.